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Flute and piccolo featured
at Kent Blossom this week

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Planning a recital means choosing music, of course, but also choosing people, and at this Wednesday’s faculty concert at the Kent Blossom Music Festival, Mary Kay Fink knew she wanted to play with Jessica Sindell.

The two have worked together in The Cleveland Orchestra for a season now — Fink, principal piccolo, has been in the flute section since 1990, while Sindell joined as assistant principal flute last fall. But their history runs deeper: Sindell studied with Fink in high school, having grown up in Pepper Pike. Later on, when she was preparing for professional auditions, she would sometimes play for Fink.

“I encouraged her to go the piccolo route,” Fink said during a recent interview, “and then she got the job in Rochester [solo piccolo in the Rochester Philharmonic].” Fink noted that she didn’t coach Sindell before the audition in Cleveland, but said that it’s been a great fit this past season. “She had subbed with us, and [principal flute] Josh [Smith] really enjoyed her. And her first teacher was Saeran St. Christopher, who plays second flute. It’s been a pretty easy transition — it’s been really wonderful.”

[Read more…]

“A rip-roaring good time”:
Yolanda Kondonassis talks about
Jennifer Higdon’s Harp Concerto

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by Rory O’Donoghue

For Yolanda Kondonassis, premiering a new concerto is an on-going project. 

“The whole mechanism of getting pieces played isn’t always factored into the commissioning of a piece,” the world-renowned harpist said by phone from New York. “You’ve got to premiere music, and then launch it. It’s like the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where after risking everything, the precious artifact gets hoisted up on a forklift and chucked onto the top shelf of the National Archives to gather dust — that’s sadly what happens to so many pieces of music. There’s a big difference between having the music, and having the music stay alive.”  [Read more…]

New “Music in the Circle” series debuts in University Circle in July

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by Daniel Hathaway

University Circle seemed to be firing on all cylinders last month — on Saturday, June 8, for example, in addition to hosting Parade the Circle, the Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival and Cleveland International Piano Competition were producing simultaneous events at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and the Contemporary Youth Orchestra was packing Severance Hall for Jason Mraz down the street.

July is a different matter, and several U.C. institutions have joined forces to inject a new series into the calendar this year designed to keep performances flowing and to increase access to classical music. We spoke with Israeli pianist and recent CIM graduate Or Re’em, who is Music Director for Music in the Circle, an international summer music festival, to find out what’s in the plans.

Re’em had previously been involved with Judson Manor’s intergenerational program that houses CIM students in University Circle’s celebrated retirement community (read a New York Times feature here). “When the festival idea came up, Judson generously offered to sponsor visiting artists in their guest apartments,” he said. “That made it possible to invite artists from South Africa, Germany, Switzerland, and Israel. The program grew bigger than I originally expected.” [Read more…]

Opinion — Piping Down: letters from a reluctant opera queen (I)

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by Parker Ramsay

For those of us keeping track, June has been an eventful month for American opera. Premieres of Anthony Davis’ The Central Park Five (Long Beach Opera) and Ian Bell’s Stonewall (New York City Opera) placed narratives of society’s dispossessed front and center on opera stages on both coasts. So too has a lost opera found a rebirth: directed by Yuval Sharon, Meredith Monk’s Atlas moved audiences in a production by Los Angeles-based Industry Opera at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Meanwhile at the Gärtnerplatztheater in Munich, I had the welcome surprise of seeing an opera which incorporates experiences of racial prejudice and homophobia at the same time. Composed in 1965, Hans Werner Henze’s Der Junge Lord tells the story of Lord Edgar, a secretive English aristocrat who settles in Willhelmine, Germany, and soon finds himself under suspicion of homosexuality, child abuse, and the general social transgression of socializing with friends of African descent (two roles are specifically cast for persons of color).  [Read more…]

Kent Blossom: Spencer Myer on Beethoven

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by Jarrett Hoffman

The Faculty Concert Series at Kent Blossom Music Festival continues next week with the latest chapter in a long partnership: the Miami String Quartet and pianist Spencer Myer.

This year they turn their attention to Beethoven’s Op. 16 in E-flat. It’s most often played by a quintet of piano and winds but will be performed here in its quartet version for piano and strings. The Miami will open the program on Wednesday, July 10 at 7:30 pm in Ludwig Recital Hall at Kent State with Haydn’s Quartet No. 64 in D, “Largo,” and they’ll conclude the evening with Bruch’s Quartet No. 1 in c. Tickets are available here.

Myer, the Gold Medalist in the 2008 New Orleans International Piano Competition, had just finished up a trip to the gym when I reached him by telephone. His coaching duties at Kent Blossom weren’t set to begin for over a week, but he was already in town, having taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music’s Summer Sonata program.

[Read more…]

The Cleveland Orchestra plays Gershwin: a conversation with pianist Aaron Diehl

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by Mike Telin

The story behind George Gershwin’s iconic Rhapsody in Blue begins when bandleader Paul Whiteman asked the composer to contribute a concerto for a jazz concert to be given in New York City’s Aeolian Hall in February of 1924. Gershwin initially declined the offer, saying there was not enough time to compose the piece.

But then an article about Whiteman’s planned concert ran in the New York Tribune in early January stating that “George Gershwin is at work on a jazz concerto,” which would be featured along with works by Irving Berlin and Victor Herbert. This was news to the composer, but after a phone call to the bandleader the next morning, Gershwin agreed to write the piece.

This weekend, pianist Aaron Diehl will return to the Blossom Music Center stage for performances of Rhapsody in Blue on Friday, July 5 and Saturday, July 6 at 8:00 pm with The Cleveland Orchestra. The concert, under the direction of Roderick Cox, will also include Bernstein’s Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront, Stravinsky’s Suite from The Firebird, and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Fireworks will follow both performances (weather permitting). Tickets are available online. [Read more…]

Digging into Kent Blossom with Mark Kosower

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by Jarrett Hoffman

Cellist Mark Kosower and pianist Jee-Won Oh will find themselves in a familiar place on Wednesday, July 3 at 7:30 pm: in Ludwig Recital Hall at Kent State University, where they’ll once again open the faculty concert series at this year’s Kent Blossom Music Festival. There’s a reason for that — whether at Kent or elsewhere, they always come up with a program that’s worth talking about.

And that’s exactly what Kosower and I did for about twenty minutes over the phone earlier this week. We discussed his and Oh’s choices of works by Beethoven, Fauré, Bach, Chausson, and Schubert, with conversational side trips both poignant and silly.

Jarrett Hoffman: I’m excited to talk to you about this program.

Mark Kosower: There are a number of themes running through it. There’s the French contingent and impressionism, with Chausson being a bridge composer between Romanticism and impressionism. Then you have the Germanic theme with Bach, Schubert, and of course Beethoven, who had a picture of Bach on his wall in at least 1 of his 39 Viennese apartments. He was always being evicted.

[Read more…]

ChamberFest 2019: a conversation with Diana Cohen and Juho Pohjonen

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by Mike Telin

This weekend ChamberFest Cleveland will wrap up its eighth season with a pair of concerts that continue to explore this year’s theme of Under the Influence. On Friday, June 28 at 7:30 pm in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium, “Precocious Virtuosity” will feature music by Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Moritz Moszkowski. And on Saturday, June 29 at 7:30 pm in CIM’s Mixon Hall, “French Connection” will include music of Poulenc, Stravinsky, Gérard Pesson, Françaix, and Fauré. Tickets are available online.

I recently sat down with violinist and ChamberFest’s co-artistic director Diana Cohen and pianist Juho Pohjonen at the epicenter of the Festival — the Cohen house.

When I arrived, a rehearsal of the Mendelssohn Octet was taking place in the living room while Frank Cohen was sitting on a sofa beaming with joy as he took in the beautiful sounds. In the kitchen and dining room, caterers were busy setting up for a reception that would include a performance by violinist Itamar Zorman and pianist Roman Rabinovich. [Read more…]

Kent Blossom celebrates 51st season

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by Rory O’Donoghue

The Kent Blossom Music Festival returns this weekend, marking the 51st season of Kent State University’s collaboration with The Cleveland Orchestra. From June 30 to August 4, the Festival boasts a five-concert Faculty Series and a ten-concert Young Artist Series, including its annual side-by-side performance between students and The Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Bramwell Tovey. 

“Our faculty concert series will feature fantastic artists from The Cleveland Orchestra, Kent State’s revered faculty, the Miami String Quartet, pianist Spencer Myer and other guest artists,” Festival director Ricardo Sepúlveda said in his letter introducing this year’s season. For these musicians, their tenure at Kent Blossom is more than just performance based — they’ll be working closely with the 43 visiting students accepted this year.  [Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera season preview: part two

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by Kelly Ferjutz
Special to ClevelandClassical.com

Unless you’re an aficionado of lyric theater, chances are that the only title you’ll recognize from Ohio Light Opera’s last four productions this summer is the first: Pirates of Penzance, the English import from Gilbert & Sullivan. Not that the other three are exactly chopped liver, or in any way inferior. They’ve just been tucked away in someone’s archives waiting to be re-discovered. All three are Ohio Light Opera premieres.

We’ll get back to Pirates, but the three premieres are truly intriguing. Music in the Air opens July 11. The music is by Jerome Kern (everyone has heard of him) and the lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, the same Hammerstein who was responsible for South Pacific, which opens the season. [Read more…]

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